ASUS Republic of Gamers (ROG) today announced Crossblade Ranger, the first AMD FM2+ motherboard to carry the revered ROG brand and packed with exclusive ROG technologies and game-boosting features for...

I think they are the chokes, they just look like that, like heatsinks.
The actual heatsinks cover the VRM's

I stiil don't see why PCI is still around.
There should only be PCIe slots on these new boards.

A bit like when we still had E-ISA slots when PCI was the new kid on the block, they were gone by the time AGP came around though iirc.

I can say that my soundcard is better on PCI than its PCIe version where some features had to be sacrificed for PCI-PCIe bridge.
Yes, it would be better if ASUS made one native for PCI and one native for PCIe, but they did not.

As for this board PCI slots are reasonable. And I see no big reason for CFX/SLI support with FM2+ since A10-7850k will not get to 120fps in many games even if it had 2x R9-290x as its IPC is still kind of inferior to intel.

And carrizo is not supposed to improve number of communication lanes for GPUs.

MSI makes nice cheap mini-ITX boards packed with features, and that is where AMD's APUs belongs for now.